It’s not so long ago that Lenovo debuted its mobile phone offerings to the Philippine market, with a clear-cut strategy of providing quality handsets that veer away from the connotation that China-made phones are not durable products.
But most of what Lenovo Mobile launched to the local market last year were considered feature phones, or those with the alphanumeric keypad that have been hallmarks of technology in the last decade.
Realizing the global shift to smartphones and the immense popularity of the Android mobile platform, Lenovo executives said they are changing the strategy to ride on the smartphone wave, and will offer affordable yet quality Android phones from now on.
We’ve seen Lenovo’s opening salvo in this space via last year’s Lenovo A60, a 3.5-inch smartphone powered by Android’s Gingerbread OS.
The China-based company is upping the ante a little bit with the impending launch of its new Lenovo A65, also a 3.5-inch dual-sim phone powered by an 800MHz chip and Android Gingerbread OS.
From left: The Lenovo A65, Lenovo P700, and Lenovo S880
Lenovo is lowering the barrier for most Filipinos with this new smartphone so much that they decided to slap it with a P5,499 product, or about as cheap as most entry-level Android-powered phones today.
But executives said they are not just after the low-end part of the mobile market. Lenovo is also expected to launch two Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS)-powered smartphones in the mid-range and high-end categories within the next few weeks.
The first is the Lenovo P700 targeted at professionals and features a 4-inch screen and a 1GHz processor. It will retail from around P10,000 to P12,000, and will come to the Philippines by the end of June.
The other is what seems to be the company’s answer to Samsung’s Galaxy Note called the Lenovo S880, which also features ICS on a 1GHz chip but sports a bigger and brighter 5-inch display. To compete in the market, Lenovo said this could possibly retail for around P18,000 to P20,000 once it hits local shores.
The upcoming Lenovo A65, Lenovo P700, and the Lenovo S880 powered by Android Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich
Lenovo said it is aiming to ride onto the smartphone wave that is slowly engulfing the Philippines, as evidenced by a recent report by research firm GfK suggesting that smartphone growth tripled in the first quarter of 2012, or the highest in Southeast Asia.
Executives said it’s possible the company could look into shipping phones with the Windows Phone OS baked into it — considering, after all, that Lenovo is a PC brand using the Windows OS — but they would likely focus on Android phones for now.
